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Updated: Jun 2, 2026
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Cross-Modal Multivariate Pattern Analysis
Published on: November 9, 2011
Modality-specific perceptual expectations selectively modulate baseline activity in auditory, somatosensory, and
Robert Langner1, Thilo Kellermann, Frank Boers
1Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical School, RWTH Aachen University, 52074 Aachen, Germany. robert.langner@rwth-aachen.de
Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
|April 30, 2011
Summary
Expecting targets enhances detection by modulating brain activity. This study reveals how preparatory attention, via sensory cortex changes and frontoparietal networks, improves perception across different senses.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Perception
Background:
- Expectations improve target detection, but the underlying preparatory attentional mechanisms are not fully understood.
- Previous studies have struggled to differentiate modality-specific preparatory activity from attentional modulation of stimulus processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the preparatory attentional mechanisms that facilitate target detection across different sensory modalities.
- To elucidate how transient changes in pretarget activity modulate signal-detection sensitivity.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
- Participants underwent fMRI while expecting auditory, tactile, or visual targets without actual stimulation.
Main Results:
- Expecting targets selectively increased baseline activity in corresponding sensory cortices and decreased it in irrelevant ones.
- Expectancy activated bilateral premotor, posterior parietal areas, supplementary motor area, right anterior insula, and right middle frontal gyrus.
- The bilateral putamen showed sensitivity to modality-specific expectations, particularly during target omission, coding for prediction-based surprise.
Conclusions:
- Detection improvement from directed attention is mediated by transient, modality-specific changes in pretarget brain activity.
- These findings support predictive-coding models, suggesting top-down biases from frontoparietal networks modulate sensory processing by altering background neural activity.
- The putamen's role in coding omission-related surprise highlights its involvement in updating predictions based on sensory input.
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